Welcome to e-Tutorial, your on-line help to ECON 4676. The present issue focuses on the basic operations of R. The core material was extracted from e-TA’s at Econ 508 of the University of Illinois, and the book “A first course in statistical programming with R” by W. John Braun, Duncan J. Murdoch. . The usual disclaimers apply. 1
R is a free, open-source, and object oriented language. Free and open-source means that anyone is free to use, redistribute and change the software in any way. Moreover, “R is”GNU S“, a freely available language and environment for statistical computing and graphics which provides a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques” (http://cran.r-project.org)
There are lot of software out there to do data analysis that are prettier and seem easier than R, so why should I invest learning R. First, of all R is an investment, not a waste of time. There are three characteristics of R that make it worthwhile learning it. First of all, it is free. Many fancier looking software used today are quite expensive, but R is free and is going to be free always. R also is a language, which means is that you don’t only get to use the functions that are build in the software but you can create your own (just to get an overview of the power of the R language you can take a look Professor Koenker’s Quantile Regression package). The last reason is that R is extremely well supported. If you have a question you just can google it, post it to StackOverflow or use R-blogger. If you are not convinced yet, just can type “why use the R language”" in Google and I think the results will speak by themselves.
You can obtain a free copy of R CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) on the web, by clicking http://cran.r-project.org and choosing your appropriate operating system.